Joseph Birnholtz - July 28, 1982

Life in Częstochowa After Liberation

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Anyway, that's uh, and when we got into, to the city, you know, to the street where I lived on ???, I think I'll go back to the house that I lived. And that's a tragic story. When I went back there, all the streets where all the Jewish people used to live--most of the Jewish people--the only Polish we had janitors, the workers and things like that, but mostly Jewish people. When I got up to the second floor upstairs--the building belong to my parents, like I told you, they were very well to do. I came up, I knocked on the door, I said, "Dzień dobry, hello," to the lady. And I says, "I just came out from concentration camp, I was five years there"--in Polish I was telling her--"and uh, I would app...this is the house that belonged to my parents and I would appreciate"--no, I said, "This room used to be the bedroom, but I used to sleep, this was my parents," and all and this is, and all that. And I said, "I would appreciate very much if you let me sleep over tonight." So those Polish people, which I can't forget after what we went through how they could say it to us, "You dirty Jew, get out of here or I'll kill you." That's the Polish people. That's how the anti-Semitism was bad, see. So I got out and I--crying, you know, that's what I'm living. So anyway, I went with all my--with my two brothers and my sister and the whole family we went to another building where my brother used to have a fa...factory from, from linens. He used to work out ??? it's called Kutha And uh, that, that building was occupied all by Germans, but when they left there was no Polish people there. It used to belong--my brother used to have a factory there, I used to go there every Sunday when I was a kid and we used to play. So that building was occupied by all Jewish people that got out from concentration camp. So I remember we stayed there. As a matter of fact, about a month or two after ??? that wasn't far away from the German-Jewish synagogue from the--there was a big bridge and the Germans came back up there a couple months later, they came back to bomb that bridge so that the Russians couldn't use it. And there like I said, it was about a half a mile away from our building and a piece from that bomb dropped that building where we slept. And I remember we were living on the second floor upstairs and uh, if my brother didn't throw me down through the pipe, I wouldn't be living. That was after the war--after we got out. And that's uh, uh, after that my uh, my brother sent me uh, we went to a kibbutz. We were going...

How--all right--so you were you...

We were liberated from the Russian army from that concentration camp January 15, 1945.

And then what did they do with you? They, uh...

Well, I--we went--we didn't have no food. So we went and worked in a Russian hospital uh, where they carried back soldiers from the front. So in order to work I was peeling potatoes and chopping wood so they would give us the means--that's how we had food to eat. And then uh, the Russians asked us where they could get some potatoes. So I remember I told them uh, just before the war ended, we worked for the Germans, we covered potatoes in the Kolonia where the Germans used to live, we--with straw we would cover for the winter. So we told the Germans that uh, we told the Russians that there's a concentration camp where we used to work ??? soldiers. And uh, so they went over there to that concentration camp and they took out the potatoes. So anyway they gave me some potatoes, which we unloaded to those people where we lived on the ??? Ulice.